Stats has stopped recording site visitors correctly
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Hello. About a week ago I noticed that WordPress stats are not correctly recording visitor numbers. For example in a given period I might have three views from three different countries, but only one visitor will be shown. I have the free version of the JetPack plugin installed – as far as I know I have not changed any settings recently.
WP.com: Unknown
Jetpack: Yes
Correct account: YesThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
I had a look at your stats and I see what you mean – on both 20 and 23 May there are more countries listed than visitors :)
That’s not really an indication of something not working, though. Or put differently, stats are intrinsically untrustworthy (not just Jetpack stats, but any website analytics system). That’s because a number of things that have nothing to do with your site can mess with how stats are recorded when someone visits your site.
One possibility here is that it’s indeed just one visitor, but they’re using a VPN that randomly switches their IP address during a session, so while it’s just one session (visitor), on each new page they view they have a different IP address, geolocated in a different country.
Another possibility is that a visitor is using a browser add-on that prevents websites from tracking them. If it specifically blocks tracking of the session it won’t let us log a visitor, but at the same time it might not be blocking us from recording the view itself.
But I can confirm that your stats are working properly if visitors aren’t somehow messing with it in their browsers – I viewed a couple pages on your site using different browsers, and it correctly logged the visitors and views for those, so on your site’s end everything is fine :)
Let me know if you have any questions about this.
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OK, thanks very much. I did consider that someone might be using a VPN but it seemed implausible.
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However that being said something obviously changed in the last couple of weeks – stats were correct before and are wrong now. It seems unlikely that large numbers of visitors simultaneously adopted some kind of behaviour that broke the WordPress stats.
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Hi there,
However that being said something obviously changed in the last couple of weeks – stats were correct before and are wrong now
If I can ask, how are you sure they are wrong? You are using some other stats tool to compare against? Something like the number of views that Facebook shows when you share your posts there?
Our stats appear to be correctly recording visits from what we have seen, but that does not mean that traffic is constant, or always going up (and never going down) but instead it’s something that is variable. Like the tide, it can ebb and flow.
For example, if you look at your stats by weeks or months, instead of days, you can see that your site visits do change over time, and in the past you have had periods with more visitors than you have now, but also periods where you had fewer. This is fairly normal based on the sites we see, and does not appear to be the result of broken stats.
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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If I can ask, how are you sure they are wrong?
Because I have tested it myself by viewing the site (while not logged in to WordPress, so it should show up in the stats). It shows up correctly as a view, but not as a visitor.
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And also, unless VPNs have become suddenly very popular, the “one visitor from five different countries” implies that views are being captured, but not visitors.
And I’m very familiar with the way traffic changes over time – I don’t expect it to be the same every day.
I thought there might be some simple issue that had gone wrong with my site but it appears there isn’t. Thanks for looking into it and I appreciate the assistance.
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Because I have tested it myself by viewing the site (while not logged in to WordPress, so it should show up in the stats). It shows up correctly as a view, but not as a visitor.
I tested it exactly the same way yesterday, and both my views and visits were recorded correctly. However, today I notice my visits aren’t recording, even though my views still are.
So I did some digging and found some other recent reports about this, and the issue was escalated to our developers only an hour ago, so it’s currently waiting on someone to check into this.
I’ve added your report as well, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we have more information on this.
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So I did some digging and found some other recent reports about this, and the issue was escalated to our developers only an hour ago, so it’s currently waiting on someone to check into this.
Thank you!!
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Good news: our team was able to find what had been causing the discrepancy, and your visitor stats should start displaying correctly again as of today.
Stats from the past couple of weeks will also be updated to show the correct visitor counts, but that might take a while :)
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